


After

by woodironbone



Category: Primer (2004)
Genre: Abe's POV, Aftermath, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Bad Sex, Clothed Sex, Codependency, Drinking & Talking, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Multiple Selves, Post-Canon, Present Tense, Reconciliation, This sounds so dark, Time Shenanigans, Unhealthy Relationships, Yuletide, Yuletide Treat, but I think it's reasonably hopeful?, canonical levels of misogyny, honestly it's extremely mild, neither of which goes uncritiqued
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-15 18:29:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13036938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/woodironbone/pseuds/woodironbone
Summary: After the party's final revision, Abe tries to confront Aaron about a lot of things, but confrontation was never his strong suit. When that goes as well as can be expected and they part ways, he thinks that'll be the end of it. It's not.





	After

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Highsmith (quimtessence)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quimtessence/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! This wasn't my assigned fandom, but I really wanted to write for it and SO I DID. I have watched Primer so many times now I think I finally understand how it all works, and that sort of transferred itself into the writing in a way which I'm hoping is not too complicated. The important part is I think Aaron and Abe would be terrible at romance, and boy was it fun to write exactly that. Thank you for requesting this extremely niche thing! I really hope you enjoy and had a wonderful holiday!
> 
>  **Content Warning Notes:**  
>  \--The "dubious consent" warning mostly refers to how bad at communication they are, and how it takes them a few extra beats to actually establish clear consent. Ultmately it is a consensual scene, just... not a very well-thought-out one.  
> \--Any implied homophobia/misogyny is pretty canonical and period-specific, insofar as the early aughts is a period.  
> \--There is one instance of someone's hand on someone else's throat. It is sexual, not violent, and there is no choking. This happens near the end of the paragraph beginning "They're not even half-undressed".  
> \--Referenced character death is non-graphic and of specific circumstances that I feel don't warrant an actual archive warning on the subject.

[__]

It’ll take as long as it takes.

The party stretches into the night, some would say later than is responsible for a Monday—it’s not a rowdy event by any means, but it _is_ a party, and people _are_ drinking. Most of them. They’re having a good time, relaxing, chatting, milling around. Most of them.

Abe hasn’t had a drop all night, and he’s jittery because of it. Partly because of it. There are a lot of reasons for him to feel off kilter. He avoids conversations, listening instead to his earpiece like a student learning a language, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Most of all he avoids Rachel, and wonders if she notices, but it’s a distant, unimportant sort of wondering. Idle thoughts. He never cracks a smile. He never lets his attention slip. He can’t afford to. He follows Aaron’s lead—not drinking, never deviating, watching, listening, waiting. Aaron is relaxed, and Abe has to wonder how many times he’s done this.

It’ll take as long as it takes—no one has uttered these words, but Abe feels them like an instinct, fears the possibility of them.

How many times has Aaron done this? _Will_ he do this? If tonight doesn’t go according to his designs, how many more will there be?

The answers to these questions are, like so many others with which Abe has been lately forced to contend, unknowable.

It’ll take as long as it takes. He can _hear_ Aaron saying it, and can imagine the lengths he would go to when really, truly pushed.

_That’s what I mean, you s—you see how different things are._

_Different, how are things different?_

_You see it, okay? I know you do._

Aaron—this Aaron (Abe gathers there are a few now)— _is_ different.

Abe thinks about the thing they say about idle hands, and wonders what the threshold of one’s cosmic influence would have to be for that to start applying to thoughts. He’s had a lot of time to think about this. He’s had a lot of time, period.

“Because we look fucking suspicious, Aaron, that’s why,” he says, and not for the first time.

“We’re just two—Keep your voice down.” Aaron’s eyes are never at rest, flicking over the crowd, scanning the room. He thumbs the neck of a beer he’s opened but hasn’t sipped once, holding it only for appearances. “We’re just two friends having a conversation.”

It would be easy—too easy—to imagine that Aaron has done this many, many times. He’s practically meditative, in a constant state of calm, which might actually be exhaustion. For Aaron that sometimes shakes out to be the same thing. Caffeinated, energized, sober, alert—these are when he’s high-strung bordering on neurotic. Sleep-deprived, worn down to the bone, that’s where he achieves perfect equilibrium. Abe’s seen it before.

Aaron needs to sleep. Sleep in the box is barely sleep at all, it’s more like something they can’t quite quantify, like superposition, like unbeing. It’s peaceful, certainly, comforting, even; but on a physical scale, in the strictest sense, it isn’t restful. Aaron’s taken too many trips by now, some of them far too long, working tirelessly toward this point. He needs to _sleep_ but he won’t. Not until this is done.

Abe’s seen it before, of course he has, all throughout college and the years they’ve spent working together since then. Abe’s seen it all, the intense laser-focus, the razor-sharpening of Aaron’s work ethic (or is it stubbornness), sharper still for every new hour of sleep missed. Far from getting unhinged and manic, a sleepless Aaron only gets calmer and calmer, which Abe used to envy. Now he thinks it might be a little sinister. And “sinister” is a word that applies more and more these days. Nothing big, not like a Bond villain or anything like that, just subtle hints, beats that weren’t there before. Earlier, when Abe stood in Aaron’s garage and wrestled with answering the phone, telling Rachel about the party and setting all of this in motion: he answered, and he hesitated, and Aaron took a few small steps toward him. Again, nothing big. He didn’t even get that close. But it was such a clear, quiet threat. An unspoken directive: _You will do this_. Abe’s never seen him like that before. It scared him.

He can’t believe he couldn’t see the trail that led them here. Never suspected anything. Never believed his friend capable of all that brought this about. Were there other iterations of himself who might have caught on? Would there ever have come a moment where he stopped, wondered how, _how_ Aaron could be so—so—

He shouldn’t blame himself. At least not for missing this. He’s always been watching Aaron, and Aaron knows it. Aaron knows by now how to hide himself from Abe, when there are things that need hiding.

“Careful you don’t drop that,” mutters Abe, reaching out to tap the sweaty bottle in Aaron’s hand with the pads of two fingers. Their hands can no longer be trusted for most things. Holding a single beer up against gravity isn’t as strenuous as forcing the precise shape of letters onto a page, but it’s not nothing, either.

“Don’t talk down to me.” Aaron says this quietly, casually, eyes still roaming across the room.

“I’m not—” Abe cuts himself off, no point going too far off script, or getting annoyed, or drawing attention.

“You were.” Aaron lifts the bottle, an incredibly practiced motion, like he’s thinking about sipping and then thinks better of it. Abe watches him with a kind of horrified fascination. The layers of deception, the calculation that goes into it. How little he seems to give a single solitary fuck, when _caring too much_ is ostensibly the reason they’re here.

That’s a big ostensibly.

“Why are you getting so worked up, anyway?”

“I’ve never been comfortable with this,” says Abe. “You know that.”

“Here you are.”

“Because _you’re_ here, Aaron.” Count on him not to intrinsically _get_ that, the absolute obviousness of it, the superficial simplicity, and beneath that, the unsustainable layers of complicated bullshit. There’s a lot they’re gonna need to talk about when this is done. After Aaron finally gets what he wants, like he always has and always does, by whatever means he deems necessary. After Aaron finally sleeps.

Abe wants to say more, but he knows time is running short, at least in the immediate, strictly linear sense. Aaron knows it too, and he’s already checked out of the conversation. It is already happening, already begun: the noise of the room is changing, everyone’s spreading out slowly as the polarizing force of a man with a shotgun parts the crowd like Biblical waters. Abe lifts the earpiece back to his ear: in the recording, he hears the man shout something—the words are muddy and difficult to understand, but the anger, the inherent danger he presents, is clear. Three seconds later, Abe hears the shout again, in real time. Rachel’s already reaching out to him, arm extended in a doggedly pacifying gesture, and even from here Abe can see her hand is shaking.

Aaron has already set his beer aside and turned around and begun to move. A simple pivot on his heel that carries him forward in a fluid motion. He walks toward the man with the shotgun, no hesitation, no fear, no realism. Mechanical, automated. Done this so many times, _prepared_ it so thoroughly, that it’s like clockwork. Nobody sees the impossibility of it. No one experiencing this situation for the first time would ever think to question the unerring steadiness of a man intervening to stop a disaster. No one sees it but Abe.

 

It turns out they will be drinking tonight after all, after the fact. It’s Aaron’s idea, because of course it is.

“That was the one,” says Aaron, grinning as he slings an arm around Abe’s shoulders. It’s an unexpected gesture, and not a particularly welcome one. Aaron is constantly refusing Abe’s attempts to touch him, usually irritably—helping him out of the box, tending to his bleeding ear, even more casual shit, it doesn’t matter what. Hell, even when Abe _fainted_ Aaron wouldn’t touch him, except to shove him back down, crouching over him with questions that smacked more of interrogation than of genuine concern—and really, an interrogation is exactly what it was. To get this friendly contact _now_ feels insulting, and it takes all the restraint Abe has left not to push him away. He knows it’s only half the artifice of camaraderie. Aaron probably needs the support to keep himself upright.

“Good,” says Abe.

“We did it.”

“Yeah.”

“We’ve _earned_ a drink.”

“You need to _sleep_ , Aaron.”

“You know what’ll help with that.” Aaron smirks, claps his hand emphatically on Abe’s shoulder. He’s acting like he’s drunk already. This is just how he was after finals senior year: after two weeks running on fumes, after the last exam was finished and the tension finally broke, when that narrow precision-strike concentration finally dispelled itself and all the fatigue caught up to him, and he did a complete 180. After days of cold shoulders and monosyllabic replies and unfeeling brush-offs, it was like it never happened. Suddenly it was all _Let’s get high, do you wanna get high? I haven’t been high in years_ and _How much do you wanna bet I can still drink you under the table_ and _It’s okay, I know, I’ve always known_.

Abe isn’t practiced at saying no to Aaron, not even with all the countless opportunities he’s apparently had, and so they go to the gas station nearest their hotel, and Aaron buys them a six-pack of pisslike beer and a bottle of painfully cheap vodka. Stingy to the last.

“There’s vending machines. At least let me get some orange juice,” Abe says as they make their way down the hall to their room.

Aaron laughs him off. “Who are you, my wife?”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Abe fumbles the hotel key out of his pocket, slips it into the slot after a few too many failed attempts. He holds the door open with his foot, awkwardly hauling Aaron in.

“Abe, c’mon,” says Aaron, pulling away from him and ambling into the room, already opening the vodka as he drops down into one of the armchairs. “We just saved the day, and no one even saw how much work went into it. Nobody knows but you and me. You really think I want to be drinking screwdrivers right now?”

“But why does that make me your _wife_?” Abe frowns down at him, hands on his hips, distantly aware that he is in fact striking a sort of classically maternal pose. “You think just because I put something in to make it taste less like battery acid I’m, what, emasculating myself? That’s stupid, I mean…. And what does that say about Kara?”

“Are you worried I’m emasculating my wife?” Aaron’s willfully taunting him now, grinning even as he knocks back a swig of awful uncut bottom-shelf vodka. He makes the appropriate face, but recovers enough to go right back to grinning.

“I just think that’s a shitty thing to say,” says Abe after a wary pause. “There’s nothing… feminine about orange juice. And even if there was, there’s nothing wrong with being feminine.”

“Oh right, because you’re this big feminist. Calm down, would you?” Aaron takes another sip and sucks air through his teeth, regarding the bottle as though it has personally offended him, rather than being _his choice_ of reward for the success of his own machinations. “Just have a beer, if it bothers you so much.”

Abe isn’t equipped to pursue this or any line of academic discussion right now, so he’s already heading toward the opposite chair. He grabs a beer but doesn’t open it. “Are you gonna sleep?”

“Promise.” Aaron holds up his hands, then drags one finger up and down his chest in a lazy sort of criss-cross, sloshing the vodka around in its big plastic jug as he does so. “Cross my heart.”

Abe scowls at him, but says nothing. They lapse into a mutual silence, perhaps comfortable on Aaron’s end, but far more sullen on Abe’s. Abe picks at the label on his bottle and stares at Aaron. Aaron drinks, resettles himself in the chair until he’s gone from a slouch to more of a liquid sprawl, and from there he gazes at Abe, heavy-lidded and smiling. It’s only when this has gone on long enough for Abe’s unwillingness to smile back to becomes conspicuous that Aaron finally acknowledges his obvious discomfort, dropping the smile and looking away in clear exasperation.

“ _What_ ,” he says.

Abe shifts in his chair, not to relax but to sit straighter, building himself up. “She’s not _your_ wife anymore,” he says.

Aaron hesitates before tipping his head forward slowly, fixing Abe with a much harder stare. “Excuse me?”

“You know that, right? You gotta know that.” Abe pyramids his hands around his jaw, staving off horror and frustration in equal measure. “Christ, Aaron, please tell me you know that.”

Far from setting his mind at ease, Aaron continues staring coldly at him for a minute before apparently letting him off the hook again, relaxing and settling back. “You’re talking about the other Aaron,” he says.

“I’m talking about _this timeline’s_ Aaron,” says Abe impatiently. What the hell did he _think_ he meant? “There’s three of you running around by my last count.”

“Only one of ‘em’s running anywhere,” says Aaron, altogether too casually. “The one you’re talking about is in the attic. Remember? Kara thought he was rats.”

“Jesus.” Abe shouldn’t act appalled over something he knows was necessary, but it’s not that so much as the utterly cavalier way Aaron dispenses the information.

Aaron, for his part, misses that nuance. “Oh don’t get holy on me, you did the same thing to yours.”

 _Not in the attic_ would be a stupid point to quibble over. _If I had a wife I wouldn’t have lied to her about all this_ is another issue entirely, and not one to be brought up if he wants to keep this conversation running. Abe supposes he might be giving himself too much credit anyway. It’s not like any of this was remotely explicable. And Aaron’s right, he’s _not_ any kind of feminist bastion; he used Rachel, judged her for the men in her life, and disregarded her when she became a complication. He wants to do things different. He wants to improve. This whole mess they’ve both created, it’s shifted things in him, led him to a point of reevaluation. He _wants_ to be better.

But he was so sure Aaron _was_ better, that he always had been. That he would have told Kara about all of this. Abe expected it; it would have been fair. That’s what marriage _is_ , right? It’s sharing secrets, trusting each other. Not Aaron scoffing over Kara’s concerns, actively excluding her, talking around her, keeping her in the dark. Humoring her by searching for the cat he hoped not to find, risking his life with no thought to her or their daughter. And now, what, he’s just sloughing them off? Do they really mean nothing to him?

Of course, Abe knows better than most that it wouldn’t be the first time he’s pulled that particular maneuver. Aaron always did value economy. Abe’s mistake was thinking the problem was him personally, but no: everyone who’s ever been in Aaron’s life has always been a resource. If your utility changes, the relationship changes. If it runs out, so does his interest in you.

“But you get what I’m saying, right?” He sits forward as if it’ll better seize Aaron’s attention. “When we came back we forfeited any right we had to our lives here. Do you understand that, Aaron?”

“Yes of course I understand that, I’m not a child,” he snaps. “I told you not to talk down to me.”

“You’re acting like it doesn’t _matter_.”

“ _You’re_ acting like it wasn’t _necessary_.” Aaron finally sits up a little straighter, finally has the presence of mind to at least act like he gives a shit. “It was your idea to fuck with this stuff, you know. Your idea to go after Platts. Remember that.”

That stops Abe in his tracks. Not because he’d forgotten it—he hadn’t forgotten, won’t ever forget—but because the thought of it is always, always paralytic. In the deepest pit of his gut he fears what they still don’t understand about causality or about the full repercussions of what they’ve done, and wonders if all it took to catalyze events, to set unseen paths in motion, was _intent_. He still wonders if somehow, by some unknowable möbius of circumstance, Thomas Granger showed up that night because of him.

“I wasn’t the first to use the fail-safe,” he says quietly. “And you didn’t even use it _as_ a fail-safe.”

“God, Abe, please spare me this moral high ground bullshit, because you _know_ it doesn’t hold water. You did everything I did. We were in this together from the start.”

“ _No_. Fuck that. We weren’t together on it because you didn’t tell me what you were _doing_ , Aaron!” Unable to keep sitting, Abe gets up and starts pacing about the room, feeling twitchy, longing for a cigarette for the first time in years. “You lied to me, you orchestrated this whole thing, did god knows what to the timeline, all for what, for—for this party? To be the big damn hero?”

“You know it’s not like that,” says Aaron, his voice dipping lower than usual, plainly offended.

Abe turns on him, impatient but unwilling to follow Aaron’s reasoning without being explicitly led. “Then what, Aaron, tell me.”

“We’ve been _over_ this,” says Aaron, equally impatient. “It was my fault he was there. If I’d changed things so he hadn’t gone, if we’d just _avoided_ the situation, he’d still be out there, still a potential threat. This way, I stopped him for good. He was a dangerous person, and I made sure he wouldn’t ever hurt anyone, and it _worked_. Are you suggesting that was the wrong thing to do?”

“I don’t know!” Abe feels himself reaching a long-simmering boiling point. All of it’s coming up for him now, all the pent-up frustration and hurt feelings and stupid, old insecurities. “It’s too much, all right? That’s why I went back. That’s what the fail-safe was _for_. Maybe we weren’t meant to mess around with this shit. Maybe we should have just let whatever happened _happen_ , or, or I don’t know, found some less direct way to affect things. We don’t even know what kind of long-term repercussions any of this is gonna have!”

“Really, Abe?” Aaron doesn’t move, but his eyes are tracking Abe around the room. As nonthreatening as his position is, there’s still the hint of danger in his tone, and the look he’s giving could only be described as unfriendly. “You’re pulling out this ‘only one true path’ destiny shit _now_? I thought we agreed that was—”

“I’m not talking about destiny, I’m talking about—I mean it’s like chaos theory. We altered a system without knowing anything about the big picture. We have no idea what kind of iterations will come out of that, what kind of effects it’ll have over the long term. What if there’s a ripple effect, and something else happens, and you don’t like that, either? What’s your endgame? Are you gonna fix every problem you come across? Where does it stop?”

“I set out to do _one thing_ ,” says Aaron. He sets the vodka down on the floor and pushes himself up to his feet with some apparent effort. “And I did it. It’s done, and there’s no taking it back unless I _choose_ to take it back, which I know I’m not gonna do. I don’t see why we can’t just let that lie.”

Some of the fight goes out of Abe at this point, stalling out against the impenetrable single-mindedness of his longtime friend and colleague. It’s always been like this. Aaron is the one who pushes, the one who leans bodily into his notions without the requisite patience for forethought. Abe is the one who obliges, every time. Aaron is smart, resourceful, and resilient. He’s always been worth the effort of going along with him.

Aaron sees the gap in Abe’s defenses and slings in again, quick and incisive: “I mean, what would you have me do? You want me to go back again?”

“No,” says Abe, shooting him an irritable glance. Unable to avoid it any longer, he twists off the cap of his beer and takes a fortifying sip.

“It’s done now,” Aaron repeats carefully, once it becomes clear Abe has nothing more to say.

“Yeah.” Abe takes a longer, stiffer drink of the beer, hating the watery flavor but needing what it represents.

“Will you just relax with me? Please?” Aaron tilts his head, dropping the whole guard dog act now, letting through a hint of his natural mild manner. Abe would be hard pressed to call Aaron _charming_ , exactly, but he does have a certain charisma, and at times it can be uniquely pacifying.

Abe doesn’t answer for a long time, and when he does it’s just a noncommittal nod and a shrug. There’s more that needs to be said here, a lot more. Not about their intrinsic philosophical disagreement, not pointless moralizing on what they _could_ have done—on that point Aaron is right, there is nothing to be gained from hypotheticals at this juncture—but about where they go from here. What happens next, when their doubles wake up from their drug-induced rest states and take over the role of _being_ them. There’s no loop to complete this time. Tonight they’ve been cut from their lives, nothing left to claim.

It should be terrifying. Abe just feels tired. He knew what he was getting into when he used the fail-safe, and Aaron did too. There’ll be time for logistics later. Right now, the only thing to save one’s palate from foul-tasting beer is more beer—enough that taste is no longer the object.

With the majority of the tension quelled, or at least content to lurk in the background for now, they each slump back into their chairs and continue their drinking: Aaron with countless little sips and Abe with four of the six beers in the pack. They accomplish this mostly without speaking, making it out like a particularly combative drinking contest.

“You _really_ don’t care?” Abe says as he nears the bottom of the fourth bottle, now slouching languidly in his chair, by all appearances as relaxed as his companion.

“Hm?” Aaron blinks at him, swaying slightly, but still very much alert. There’s still a _lot_ of liquid in his bottle; his sips have been wisely conservative.

“Kara. And Lauren.” Abe finishes off his beer and sets the bottle on the floor. That’ll do him for now. He’s in a good solid state of buzz without having to get fully wasted, which seems unwise right now. “Losing them. Just like that.”

Aaron frowns thoughtfully at his bottle before he decides to set it aside as well. He ends up shrugging, which has the dual effect of telling Abe nothing and telling him a lot.

“I don’t get it.” Abe leans back, throwing his arm over his eyes. “You had a whole life together.”

“I’ve known you longer than I’ve known Kara,” Aaron points out.

“You have a _kid_.”

“And she’ll have the other Aaron.” Abe uncovers his eyes in time to see Aaron shrugging again. “They’ll be fine.”

“That isn’t…” Abe shakes his head and sits forward, leaning heavily on his knees. “How can you be so calm about it? You’re never gonna see them again.” This time, Aaron’s continued silence sets him a bit more on edge, and he sits forward a few inches more, coming perilously close to leaning right off the seat. “ _Right?”_

Aaron looks up as though startled out of some important work, annoyed and bewildered by the sudden emphasis. “Right, what?” he says. “What do you even care, Abe? Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted anyway?”

“What I’ve… _what?”_ Abe is about to say more but then gravity gets the better of him and he slips down off the chair, tumbling onto the carpeted floor with a pronounced grunt. Aaron breaks into a surprised laugh, and he’s still grinning when Abe picks himself up, standing shakily and staring at him. Aaron would be content to let that little bit of slapstick move them on, but Abe refuses to let that happen. “No, what do you mean, Aaron? Isn’t _what_ what I’ve always wanted?”

Aaron’s smile doesn’t fade completely; he holds Abe’s gaze for a weighty beat before looking away, slow and leisurely, making a show of disinterest. “You know what I mean.”

Abe continues to stare at him, and Aaron continues to gaze off with insulting nonchalance. “No, I don’t, Aaron,” says Abe sharply. “ _What_.”

“Jesus, Abe, I’m not doing this again.” Aaron hauls himself up out of the chair, sways in a way that suggests it has very little to do with alcohol, then stumbles across the room, brushing past Abe without quite making contact.

“Where are you going?” Abe demands, turning to watch him.

“To take a piss, is that okay with you?” Aaron tugs the bathroom door behind him but it doesn’t close all the way, so Abe turns around and stares angrily at the floor, his skin burning. He knows exactly what Aaron is getting at, but it’s not a point he wants to get close to, so he struggles to keep it at arm’s length.

“You’re getting real touchy,” Aaron calls from within the bathroom. “Maybe you need sleep too, huh?”

Abe lifts a hand in a dismissive swat, as though the words are gnats buzzing around his head. He’s distracted, caught up in frustration, memory, and endless, endless questions. “I’m too fired up,” he mutters. He hears Aaron washing his hands, but he doesn’t turn around.

“I noticed,” says Aaron, sounding closer now.

“Maybe if you’d give me a straight answer and stop fucking with—” Abe turns around and stops, his breath catching in his throat, words juddering and dying there too, as he finds Aaron to be much, much closer than he’d anticipated. Shoeless, moving quiet on the plush hotel carpeting, he got within mere inches before Abe managed to turn around, and now he’s just _there_ , hands in his pockets, sort of staring in an unfocused way.

A beat passes between them, much too close between, and Aaron draws one hand from his pocket, sniffs and rubs at his nose, like brushing off an itch, dark eyes darting quick around the room before coming back to light, abstractly, on Abe’s jaw. Abe swallows hard, his throat wasteland-dry, as the millions of synapses all telling him to pull backcompletely fail to fire. Despite his best efforts no words can make it past his lips, nothing but slow, shuddering breath wet on his tongue before—as—

—as Aaron’s hand slides around the back of his neck and pulls him in, just nudges really, too close for a pull, and the spike of energy fizzing down Abe’s spine has him so rigid he might have strained something. His hands are useless, sort of perched in the air like he’s approaching a rabid animal. Absurdly, the thing that jumps out at him is the _taste_. God, he wishes Aaron had bought better vodka.

It isn’t much of a kiss with each of them equal parts drunk and exhausted, Abe not expecting it and Aaron far too detached; the motions are right but the feeling is wrong, and soon enough Aaron stops, hovering close and just looking Abe over, studying him really, still holding him by the back of the neck.

Abe swallows again, struggling to right himself amidst a sea of _why now, why now, why now_.

“What—” is all he manages to get out before Aaron kisses him again, and this time his other hand cups around the side of Abe’s face and he puts a burst of momentum behind it, taking a few steps forward and driving Abe to stumble back. Still Abe doesn’t touch him; still his hands flounder in dead air, keeping balance as he allows Aaron to maneuver him inelegantly. He’s letting this happen, he realizes; no, not _letting_ it, he’s returning it, maybe not with all of him but he’s kissing Aaron back, of course he is. Neither of them is particularly good at this; Aaron is too brisk and too technical, Abe sluggish and soft and woefully out of practice, and while their differences have served them in almost every iteration of their work together, here they are a poor match. That didn’t stop them before, and it certainly doesn’t now.

Abe’s back finds the wall eventually, forcing his hands to take action, first bracing against the wall and then hastily adjusting and drifting, tentative, uneasy, to Aaron’s hips, his waist, his arms. He’s so thin, handholds are hard to find halfway, but Abe still treats him like he might break.

Aaron’s patience with the kiss wears off abruptly, and he switches tacks to mouthing at Abe’s neck, forcing himself closer and driving his knee between Abe’s thighs.

“ _Aaron_ —” This finally jarring him out of his acquiescent stupor, Abe grips him hard at the shoulders, not quite pushing him away but holding them apart, “what is this? What are you doing?”

“What’s it look like?” Aaron’s lips are parted, his breathing short and shallow. Eyes still flicking around rapidly, but within the limited radius of Abe’s face.

“This isn’t…” Abe hesitates, shifting awkwardly against Aaron’s leg, struggling to wrap words around this precarious situation. “Are you just doing this to prove a _point_ , or…”

“I think my point is pretty well proven,” says Aaron, lips twitching without quite smiling, pressing in as close as Abe will let him and drawing a startled gasp. “Sorry, did you have an objection?”

“I can think of several I _should_ be making,” says Abe, breathless, wholly _out_ of breath, it’s fucking impossible to think with that slow-burning pressure between his legs. “Aaron, I’m—I’m not—I _never_ wanted you and Kara to break up, you know that, right? I would never do that.”

“Abe, for Christ’s sake, take a hint,” says Aaron. His hands drop neatly to Abe’s waist and drag over him, wandering slowly back up to his chest. “I’m done talking.”

“Yeah, no, I got that.” There’s a big part of Abe that just wants to leave it and let Aaron do his business, but after a moment spent grappling with it he clutches one of Aaron’s hands in his own, holding it still. “Aaron, I’m serious,” he says quietly, unable to meet his friend’s eyes. “Are you only doing this to humor me? Because if you are, I… I don’t want it like that, Aaron. Not as like a pity thing. Please just be straight with me, all right?”

“Are you sure that’s the word you’re looking for?” says Aaron softly, through a smirk.

Abe’s grip tightens by a few degrees, his jaw set in a hard frown. Far from being amused by the weak-as-shit pun, he stares Aaron down until the smirk fades.

“I’m doing this because I want to,” says Aaron, sounding colder now that he’s forced to be serious. “I don’t remember that being a problem for you before.”

“College was a long time ago, Aaron” says Abe, and if Aaron detects a bit of a sulk, it wouldn’t be off the mark.

“Then we’re overdue.” Aaron doesn’t make any more moves, again studying him for a few long seconds. He sighs, softening belatedly, almost begrudgingly. “Do you want me to stop?”

Abe stares back at him, and again he finds his breath catching, words sticking to the inside of him. He knows he should say _yes, Aaron, fuck off, go to sleep_. He knows he should be insulted at how this is coming up _now_ , after so many long, difficult years of learning and relearning how to be around Aaron once it became clear that the single solitary night they spent together senior year after finals was never going to be brought up again. Watching Aaron know a girl for barely six months before marrying her, constantly and continuously redefining when Abe could touch him until the when became _never_. The casual, practiced homophobia that felt necessary to corporate life, words that seemed to come easy to Aaron but always left a bad taste in Abe’s mouth. There’s so much he _should_ say.

In the end he doesn’t say anything, just relaxes his grip and sinks forward and kisses Aaron with his fingers twisting into the front of his still-buttoned shirt. This time he’s feverish; this time Aaron doesn’t let it continue, switching back to his neck, which is, well, that’s fine, too. Abe lifts his chin, offering himself too willingly, shuddering as Aaron breathes heavy against his skin, drags over him with the subtle scrape of teeth. Abe never thinks too hard about what Aaron’s like with Kara, but he’s almost sure it’s never like this. This, apparently, is on reserve for him.

Aaron rolls his hips forward, rutting against him, awkward but no less effective for it, hands moving again to clamp around Abe’s arms, pushing them down to his sides and pinning him back. Abe uses what reach he has remaining to grip at Aaron’s hips, letting his fingers splay out around his narrow waist. This, this feels like a spectacularly bad idea but he can’t stop; all the barriers it took him so many years to cultivate come crashing down and it’s like he was starving without ever really knowing it.

He gasps, full-throated and embarrassing, and he feels Aaron’s grin by the scratch of an unshaven cheek moving against his neck. Either satisfied with this reaction or generally unable to stop upping the stakes, Aaron pulls back and drags Abe along, away from the wall, staggering like some ungainly four-legged animal toward the bed. At the last minute Aaron pivots sharply, turns Abe’s back to the bed, and shoves him down onto it. As soon as Abe’s legs strike the mattress his legs buckle and he drops into a startled sit, gazing up at Aaron with an expression that rests uncomfortably on the scale between awe and trepidation. He’d decided—he’d led himself to believe, after years of building insecurity and no evidence to the contrary, that their hazy, drunken night together in college had been a massive indulgence on Aaron’s part. Not exactly a regret, given how their friendship survived, but rather a thing to be tucked away and forgotten about, a mistake that was presumed mutual. This, now, out of the apparent blue—the eagerness, the aggressive physical energy, the sure-footedness even under the lingering fog of alcohol, the precise engineering that’s going into every step—it’s impossible to parse. It doesn’t fit within the system of comprehension he’d eked out for himself. Aaron stands over him and unbuttons his shirt with the rote manner of one who does this sort of thing all the time.

“Wait.” Abe’s voice comes out faint, a ghost of itself. He reaches up as if to rest his hand on Aaron’s chest but catches himself out of habit. Aaron’s hands go still, his shirt still halfway buttoned. Abe takes the opportunity to catch his breath, stalling before he utters the question he can’t avoid: “Have we done this before?”

For a terrible instant Aaron just stands there nonplussed; then, unexpectedly, he barks out a laugh. “Is that a joke?”

“Tell me the truth, Aaron,” Abe snaps. “How many times has this happened? This night, this part of it?”

The bemused expression slips gradually from Aaron’s face until he’s left looking strangely numb, or maybe just tired. “Abe,” he says quietly. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“Are you sure?” Abe can feel himself breathing faster, his knuckles tensing as he fists his hands into the bedspread. “Because I don’t know if I believe that. There’s a lot I didn’t think you were capable of, Aaron.”

For a tense, terrible moment, there’s a flicker across Aaron’s face of the same cold, vaguely threatening energy Abe had picked up before, in the garage. It isn’t a violent or even particularly noticeable shift, but it’s enough that Abe can see it, a subtle shift in his breathing, a slight widening of the eyes. Then it’s gone, and Aaron averts his eyes.

“I _wouldn’t_ do that, Abe,” he says. “And honestly the fact that you even have to ask is… I don’t really know what to think.”

Abe relaxes a by degrees, though he resents the implication that _he’s_ being unreasonable here, when all of this is coming out of stark nowhere, leaving him further and further adrift. “I just don’t understand… why now,” he mutters.

“Why not?” Apparently eager to move away from this, Aaron reaches out to him, fingers playing at tenderness on his chin for a fractional second before he chickens out of that and goes for the tie instead. “Nothing’s keeping us.”

Meaning what, the only obstacle to this for the past _decade_ has been his marriage? Abe would scoff and make some bitter retort if Aaron didn’t suddenly tighten his grip on his tie and give it a slight, sharp tug. Abe jerks forward, lips parting in a wet, surprised gasp.

“What the _hell_ , Aaron?” he blurts, flushing hot, feeling it spread over his neck and cheeks for Aaron to see, to know he’s not entirely as angry as he sounds.

“You’re the one who said we forfeited our lives here,” says Aaron, his voice thick and gravelly from arousal—that Aaron is _aroused_ by this is a distracting thing to realize, forcing Abe to confront the reality of the situation, that this isn’t some kind of elaborately cruel prank. Aaron stares down at him, maintaining a tight grip on his tie. “We’re boundless. We can do anything.”

Right. So not the marriage, not exactly. Everything. Aaron’s entire life, built around an idea of who he was, an idea of what success looks like, what social strata he fits into—it ran so deep that even days spent shut up in a hotel room where no one knew them didn’t occur as an opportunity, because Abe isn’t the sort of person that people like Aaron have affairs with. It’s only now, with everything Aaron’s built for himself crumbling down around him, that Abe becomes a viable option. He’s all that’s left.

It’s not flattering.

“Can we stop talking now?” Aaron says, balancing between wry and wary.

It’s not flattering and it’s a bad idea, but what’s one more bad idea, tonight, caught in this space between their lives as they knew them and the unknown future.

Abe thinks he can live with it.

Without breaking eye contact, Abe swats his hand away, reaches up and loosens the tie himself, pulling it over his head and dropping it on the floor. Ridiculous schoolboy blushing aside, this’ll go better if Aaron has less shit to prove.

Raising his hands in mock defeat, Aaron backs off and resumes unbuttoning his shirt, though his gaze remains fixed on Abe. Abe feels pinned under it, hopelessly self-conscious, caught up in the awful internal calculus of how much of this is alcohol and how much is sleep deprivation and how much is opportunistic experimentation— _if you have it, you gotta use it, right?_ —all the while struggling to keep from losing himself in the rush and roar of old, long-denied impulses.

They’re not even half-undressed—Abe’s shirt undone, Aaron down to his undershirt—by the time Aaron loses patience. He’s still acting like he’s on a schedule, like every step of this has an alloted time limit before he has to move onto the next thing, which is incomprehensibly unromantic but Abe doesn’t and _can’t_ afford to give a shit about _romance_ right now. That was never on the table, and it still isn’t, and he’s not stupid or self-destructive enough to pretend otherwise. So he pushes himself backward, getting himself more completely on the bed as Aaron half-lunges, half-collapses onto him, fitting between his legs, bearing down over him. Abe brings his hands up to brace against Aaron’s chest as Aaron kisses him again, rougher this time, one of his hands dragging down Abe’s cheek, his jaw, before catching around his throat. He doesn’t apply any pressure, just treats it like a loose handhold, and Abe’s not about to object either way. The rougher the better, he thinks, at least that way they can channel their continuing tension into it, they can communicate on a level that makes sense to them right now. Pretending at affection would feel prohibitively disingenuous, and would only make the whole thing cheaper than it is already.

Aaron leans more of his weight down, pressing him into the mattress, grinding against him; when Abe tries to slip his hands between them and get at their trousers Aaron grabs his wrists and pins them back. Abe almost demands _why_ , before he realizes—perhaps the best evidence that this hasn’t happened before, Aaron doesn’t have the equipment for this, it’s not like either of them brought condoms. Aaron can’t fuck him outright, so he’s making do. Funny; they’re more like horny teenagers now than when they were just barely into their twenties, drunk and high and fooling around in a dark dorm room.

It doesn’t take long for Aaron to start having trouble holding himself up; he sort of sinks down until they’re flush, moving his whole body against Abe’s, breathing hot and heavy in his ear. Abe swallows thickly and moves back against him, squirming slightly in his grip, letting more and more of himself go. His own breath is getting shaky and uneven, his whole body jittering as he struggles to find purchase against the warm, lean, generalized pressure. As he gets further and further from his various misgivings with this situation, he wants more and more: for Aaron to strip his clothes off, to push him onto his stomach, to fuck him hard and fast like he would, holding him down, never saying a word. He’s not going to get it, but he thinks about it, letting his eyes slip shut, letting his breath become heavier and more labored as Aaron rubs hard and increasingly desperate against him. Aaron is already past overthinking it; he can’t keep still, his hands moving from Abe’s wrists to his shoulders, his waist, his hair, whatever he can get hold of. Over time, inevitably, it gets easier for Abe to fall into place with him. They achieve a kind of synchronicity, less like an argument and more like how it is when they’re working, constantly pushing each other, talking over each other to finish their thoughts, Aaron led by impulse and Abe by instinct. Aaron’s hands fumble less, moving with intent, reaching under Abe’s shirt, around the back of his neck, touching him extensively as if to make up for lost time. Abe arches up under him, answers every point of contact with one of his own, unable to stop now that he’s finally allowed: he concentrates on running his hands up Aaron’s bare arms and cupping around his jaw as though touching him is of greater concern than satisfying his own arousal. In some ways it is. This isn’t about sex any more than it’s about romance. It’s no longer combative, but it’s messy, two people who know too much about each other, who are starting to feel like they don’t know each other at all, exploring each other like this is their only chance; knowing it _is_ their only chance.

“Aaron,” Abe finally breathes, his voice going a little uneven, halfway to a whimper. A concession he didn’t intend to make.

“Don’t.” Aaron stops his mouth with another kiss, one hand planted on his collarbone, the other reaching between them to jerk himself off. Abe can feel the rough brush of his knuckles through his clothes and keeps rolling his hips up against him, taking what he can get. What is that pretentious thing Aaron’s fond of saying? _We take from our surroundings, and make of it something more_.

Aaron comes first, Abe following him shortly after, and for a moment they lie there breathing together in a sweaty, tangled heap, and it’s almost nice.

Of course, it can’t last. Aaron is quick to shift off of him, rolling onto his back with a heavy, tired sigh. “Did you bring a change of clothes?” is the first thing out of his mouth, like he’s asking if Abe remembered something on a test drive checklist.

Abe looks at him, squinting as he struggles to parse the question. “Did you?”

“I swiped a few things.” Aaron is stuck gazing up at the ceiling. “Knew it would be my last chance.”

“Yeah.” Sensing that this moment is over, Abe sits up, feeling shaky, rattled, unresolved. “I just grabbed some socks and underwear. Figured I’d buy the rest.”

There are still a lot of practical issues to be worked out. He hasn’t got that sorted in his head yet, but now’s definitely not that moment. He levers himself off the bed and makes his way to the bathroom, grabbing his duffel bag on the way. “I’m gonna take a shower.”

“W—let me in there first, then.” Aaron half-tumbles out of bed, picking himself up and grabbing his bag as well. “I’m just gonna wash up real quick. I’m exhausted.”

“Yeah. Good.” Abe turns aside to let him pass by, leaning against the wall. The door shuts, and inside he can hear the sink faucet going.

Everything slides back to normal, just like that. The ease with which Aaron brushes it off shouldn’t surprise him. Abe shouldn’t bother letting it hurt. He looks at his feet, continues looking at them when Aaron emerges from the bathroom, now in his undershirt and boxers—more undressed for sleep than he was for sex. Abe tilts his head just enough to watch him as he wanders back to the bed and collapses into it. He seems to pass out almost immediately.

Abe’s shower is long and ponderous, mostly spent staring at the water as it trails down the tile wall, running from individual rivulets into a smooth mass. Afterward he gets dressed all the way, trousers, shirt buttoned, everything. Stepping back out into the quiet room, he even picks up his tie off the floor and loops it back over his head. Part of him wants to leave now, let Aaron figure things out himself, but he knows he can’t do that. They aren’t done talking.

The lamp’s still on but Aaron’s still sleeping soundly, so Abe doesn’t bother with it. He sinks back into his armchair and leans back in it, stretching his legs out on the ottoman, one elbow bracing on the arm rest, fingers pressed to his temple. He stares at Aaron, the subtle rise and fall of his chest. The whole evening feels far away, like a weird, bad dream with several disparate stages. He struggles to seize onto them, organize them into something he can work with. He’s been tired all night, but now he knows he can’t sleep. He has a lot to think about, a lot to sort out, and he needs to do it now, while it’s still fresh, or as fresh as it can be. If it keeps him up through the night, just sitting there watching his friend sleep, so be it. It’ll take as long as it takes.

[__]

In the end, they don’t have a continued conversation so much as a communication breakdown. It happens at the airport. Getting there involves a tense cab ride and a lot of indecision. Abe hasn’t brought his luggage, because he has no intention of going anywhere but back to the hotel. Aaron knows this. He displays his awareness in light twitches of his fingers as they rest uneasy on his knees. Abe watches the motions idly, from the corner of his eye, his posture relaxed. He’s tired. He didn’t sleep. But he knows what’s coming.

Aaron tries to convince him at the gate. _Let’s just go_ , he says, _let’s get out there, let’s go somewhere where we don’t speak the language_. He insists this will pass, all they need is to get out of here and they’ll be on their way to being friends again. Whatever it takes. As long as it takes.

“I’m staying here,” Abe says, and Aaron’s reaction is difficult to watch, the hardening of his stare, the slow collapse of what little hope he’d built up.

“ _Why_ ,” he says, his voice going thick and rough, hurt but refusing to show it. When Abe doesn’t reply immediately, he says, “They’ll be building their own boxes in another day. And yours already knows what they built. You’re not gonna be able to watch them forever.”

Abe interrupts: “The box Abe is building won’t work. He’s got it wired wrong.” While Aaron was busy keeping his schedule, Abe had his own work cut out for him. He smiles faintly, without humor. “And if they fix that, I’ll start actually taking pieces out of it. It’s just a gimmick, it doesn’t work anymore. And your double will say they have to move onto something else, and mine will agree. They’re friends.”

The subtle impact of that, the alienation of it— _they_ , not we—hits him without showing, and it probably does Aaron too, though he buries it all in bitterness.

“You’re staying,” he says brusquely. “ _Why._ Why, let’s see, why would Abe stay? What possible reason could there be to be here?”

Abe doesn’t know for certain where he’s going with this, but the implication is clear, the harshly petty bent to his words, the curt inflection. He ducks his head down, avoiding Aaron’s eyes, memories of the previous night flickering past. Aaron is annoyed, but it isn’t just that; this is getting to him harder than it would under normal pretense. Not in a way he’s ready to confront, clearly, but it stings all the same.

“I guess,” Aaron continues, swallowing, visibly struggling to keep himself together, “that it just won’t go back far enough, will it.”

It hits Abe like a stone dropping in the pit of his stomach. His eyes flick back up to Aaron’s, feeling a prickle of adrenaline crawling up the back of his neck, not from excitement, but pure, cold dread.

Worse, far worse than anything he could have expected, is where Aaron is headed with it: “Tell you what, why don’t you take Kara and Lauren,” he says, absurd, unkind presumptions spilling out of him at a rapid clip; “and put them in the box, and then you and Aaron can each keep a set, and you’ll both have families, and you can stop feeding off of him.”

“Don’t come back,” says Abe, quick and sudden, as quickly and suddenly as he finds himself breathless with fury. How _dare_ he, how dare he assume this of Abe, how dare he imply it, and in the same breath treat his family once again like commodities? Above all, how dare he dig into the open wound of what happened last night with absolutely no regard for the full nuance of it? He’s always known Abe to be lonely; he’s always known Abe to long for the stability of family, the continued connection of another person; it’s impossible not to see it, the way Abe has been a constant presence in his life, a body in orbit around his domestic world, with all the dinners and long nights and even chores shared together in his kitchen, but he _knows_ , god, he _must_ know that it’s not the spectre of Aaron’s family he desires, but Aaron himself. How could last night have happened and still leave him with this conclusion?

Abe doesn’t want the answers to these questions. He’s done with it, all of it. Like a cord snapping, Aaron has just made this so, so much easier. There’s a ferocity swelling up in him he almost doesn’t recognize, frightening and uncomfortable. He stares at Aaron without flinching this time, bile in his throat.

“You can each keep a set in a hemisphere,” Aaron practically sneers.

“Aaron, I don’t think there’s ever been any reason for me to show you what I’m capable of,” says Abe, quiet and sharp, “but I’m telling you this now: go out there, and do whatever the hell you want, there’s no way in the world I can stop you. But don’t come back here. And don’t come near them.” He draws a short breath, steadying himself. He feels like he’s going to be sick. “Any of them.”

Aaron looks back at him, the fight visibly going out of him, the anger draining from his expression. He doesn’t speak. He knows by now there’s nothing left to say.

 

That was the last time they saw each other.

 

And it is bad, for a time. Not the loneliness. Not _just_ the (crushing) loneliness. It’s more primitive than that. For a while Abe struggles to survive. He is not built to live off the grid, was not wholly prepared for how much it would take out of him. Money is the most obvious problem. He had some foresight, withdrew what he could before it was too late, set himself up as best he could, but with no real identity to call his own and little to no criminal experience his options are limited. The hotel was a stopgap at best and an unsustainable drain on his rapidly dwindling funds at worst. It’s not even a month before he knows he needs a real solution, and fast. So he leaves the hotel, sinks the rest of what he has into a car, and prepares himself for what has become unavoidable.

He tells himself there will be a limited number of trips. He drafts them out, carefully, precisely. Realistically, practically, he knows it will take the time that it takes, but creating an outline, a procedure he can adhere to as strictly as possible, is a necessary comfort. The idea of creating more loops, even the safe, closed variety, sets his teeth on edge. He makes a promise to himself: every journey back will serve a purpose. This time, there will be no fucking around.

There is the other concern, and that’s of his health. He doesn’t know what more trips will do to him; he’s still not sure what the trips he’s already made have done to him. He tries to tell himself what’s done is done. He’ll be as careful as he knows how. It’s what he has to do. Any further deterioration of his physical self has to be taken as an acceptable loss.

There are months that pass slowly. Time dilates, lengthening, feeding back in on itself. Abe closes every loop; he spreads the trips out over periods of days to avoid exhaustion or acclimation, both of which feel dangerous in different ways. He keeps to the rules he set for himself. He makes money, enough to cover food, clothes, car expenses, and, eventually, to put toward the looming project of a falsified identity. Through all of this he maintains his original purpose for being here: watching his double and Aaron’s, intervening only when necessary. Keeping them from recreating their mistakes.

They stick at it longer than he expects them to. Waking up in the attic with missing time and a similar story from the other Abe seems to have more of a staying effect on Aaron than Abe had anticipated. They keep at it stubbornly, forcing Abe to resort to greater and greater incursions to hinder their progress. He’d underestimated the difficulty in outwitting not only himself, but Aaron as well. In addition to being every bit as clever as he is, the two of them are rightly paranoid, shaken by the inexplicable events surrounding their rise to timeline dominance. The work of thwarting them is tiring, monotonous, demoralizing, but he keeps at it. It will take as long as it takes.

And sometimes he thinks about Aaron. He expects Aaron—both Aarons, no doubt—will have already gotten around to creating new identities, forging paths forward by doing God knows what. Abe doesn’t want to know. Sometimes he actually believes that. Sometimes, when he’s at his lowest, Abe misses him.

 

It is raining on the day it happens. It hasn’t rained much this summer, and Abe is determined to enjoy it. Things are quieting down—work on the box has undergone a significant decline as Aaron finally tires of it and the other Abe begins to lose hope. Engineering the loss of his own excitement and curiosity, his own will to fight for it, has turned out to be a draining experience. Another thing he didn’t anticipate. Now, with some long-awaited reprieve on the horizon, Abe sits under an overpass hanging over an infrequently traveled road, watching the rain hit the pavement.

He doesn’t hear the footsteps at first, too lost in the moment. When he realizes he’s not alone, it’s too late to get out of sight. He turns sharply, needs only a few fractured seconds to understand who he’s seeing, who it is coming toward him at a casual pace, who draws to a halt once they’re close enough to converse.

For a moment Abe is frozen, thinking he’s about to have to pull some Oscar-worthy performance out of his ass, pass himself off as the other Abe and come up with a solid excuse for why he’s here. Lies upon lies that will never hold up. His week’s worth of beard is all the evidence anyone needs against that story.

But that’s only for a moment. It’s all too easy to notice the pieces that don’t add up. The relaxed gait. The two or three days’ growth of facial hair that wasn’t there this morning. The dark clothes, the hoodie in particular looking out of character on him, as if he’s designated this specific wardrobe to set himself apart. The easy fucking smile, like nothing in the world has happened, like no time has passed.

“Hi, Abe,” he says. Hands in his pockets. Unguarded, non-defensive. “You’re a hard man to find, you know that?”

Abe gets to his feet slowly, keeping his eyes on this seeming phantom. His gears aren’t finished turning. “What are you doing here?” he asks in a low voice.

Aaron shrugs, glancing around even though there’s nothing here to see. “I had business in town,” he says, like it’s funny. It _should_ be funny. It’s an absurd line, all things considered. Abe doesn’t laugh.

“I told you not to come back here,” he says, one hand already curling into a fist, though it feels like a defensive motion.

Aaron looks at him then, incredibly passive, eyes darting once to his fist just to take note of it, then back up to hold Abe’s gaze with unconcerned steadiness. “No, Abe, you didn’t.”

Abe stares at him, not sure what to make of this or whether to trust it, before a few more practical assumptions slide into place and he’s left having to reassess what’s actually happening here. He accepts it gradually, uneasily. “You’re the other one,” he says, breathing out in a shudder. He unclenches his fist. “The second Aaron.”

“I like to think of myself as the senior Aaron, actually, but yeah, sure.” He says this rather good-naturedly. He’s… strange. Different. Disarmingly calm, even pleasant. Abe’s not sure how to take it. “I guess things didn’t end well with my replacement?”

“What _are_ you doing here?” Abe says again, refusing to give ground. He can’t be sure, not totally, when this Aaron was in his life, which things he remembers are the same ones this Aaron remembers. There was a lot of revisionist history going on, a lot of overlapping rewrites, and of course there’s the issue with this Aaron having been out in the world for a while, having experiences Abe can’t begin to guess at. They’re all the same Aaron deep down, he knows that, but experiences shape them too, leaving subtle differences. He doesn’t know what to expect from this Aaron, or how to read him.

“I told you,” says Aaron, “I had business.” He sighs and looks at his feet. In a matter of seconds his manner shifts from laid back to somber, or pensive, or something. “Something… happened. I had to take care of it.”

“ _Something_ ,” Abe echoes, unimpressed. “You know I’m gonna need more.”

“Aaron’s dead, Abe.” Aaron looks at him again, no trace of amusement this time.

It has the effect of a punch to the gut. Abe’s whole body stutters like an engine failing to start, the breath going out of him, the tension leaving his shoulders as smoothly as water running off stone. He stands there, his lips moving wordlessly, trying to wrap his head around the multifaceted implications of the bomb that’s just been dropped.

It shouldn’t surprise him.

It _shouldn’t_ surprise him.

“The last Aaron,” he clarifies, unnecessarily.

“My replacement, yes.”

“He…” Abe swallows thickly. “How?”

“How do you think?” Aaron folds his arms, affecting a sort of slouch that looks grotesque on a man reporting his own death. “It got to be too much. The machines become lethal if you’re not careful. I know you always suspected as much.”

Abe raises his hands to his face. His hands are shaking. His face feels hot. He presses his fingers against his skin, his eyes, palms covering his mouth. He tries to breathe normally.

“You seem to be doing all right, though.” Aaron carries on as casually as if they were talking about the weather. There’s no humor in it, but it seems the brief dip into absolute sobriety is past now that the news itself is out.

“How could you possibly think I’m _all right_ right now?” Abe demands, muffled under his hands.

“Physically.” Aaron pauses, though Abe still doesn’t look at him. “He was in the machine when it happened. He just… didn’t wake up. Never came out. I found him.”

“You found—you mean you opened the box?” Abe lowers his hands, staring at Aaron with a new kind of horror. “With him inside?”

“It’s a damn good thing I did,” says Aaron. “I’d been keeping tabs on him for a while. It wasn’t too hard to track him down; he was never as careful as you. I had to make sure he wasn’t going to screw anything up for me. Activity ceased for a while, and… I just put it together, Abe. I had to open it. Do you understand what would have happened if someone else had found him? Found the box? You know all our dental records, our DNA, that’s all the same, right? How well do you think it would go for our doubles here if one us turns up dead in a ditch?”

Abe _has_ thought about it. It’s been an on-again-off-again source of stress for the past many months. It was something he’d managed to put off worrying about; it had mostly seemed a distant threat, something to worry about only when his thoughts couldn’t sit still. Now, having it carted out in front of him, coupled with news that is still deeply, viscerally earth-shattering, he feels spotlit for his shortsightedness. It’s not as if there was anything he could do about it. He doesn’t have an infrastructure, a fail-safe for his own life. Should he get one? _Can_ he get one? He’s been in over his head since the day this began.

He still can’t come to grips with it. Here’s Aaron, telling him Aaron is dead. There’s no precedent for this situation, no socially ingrained guidelines for how to process this and how to proceed. Is it stupid to mourn? To feel, keenly, like a hand reaching into his chest and grabbing his innards, the absence and loss of someone who’s standing right in front of him?

Abe doesn’t know. It probably isn’t right in any context to shrug off the death of someone you’ve known. And he doesn’t feel like he knows the man standing in front of him.

“What did you do?” he asks on autopilot, his voice dry and brittle, his eyes unfocused.

There’s another pause, this one a bit more pointed. “What I had to.”

Abe shuts his eyes briefly. He thinks about dental records, about fingerprints, about the sheer amount of effort that would go into erasing a body that has two active duplicates.

“Abe,” says Aaron, and only when he says it does Abe realize just how long he’s been silent. He opens his eyes and sees Aaron staring at him with something approaching concern. “Abe, do you want to get a drink?”

“A _drink?”_ Abe almost laughs at the surrealism of it. “You want to go for a—Are you shitting me? What did you come here to do? How did you find me? Come to that, how were you tracking Aaron in the first place, how—how is all of this _possible?”_

“Yeah, I knew you’d have questions.” Aaron looks away with a faint smile, like he’s enjoying some memory. “And I’m gonna answer them, all right? That’s what the drink is for. Come on, I know where we’ll be inconspicuous. My treat.”

The offer is one thing. That Abe is considering it is another. He needs a day to think about this. He needs several days. He needs days upon days to reconcile the death of his friend with the introduction of a new version of his friend, who doesn’t _know_ , doesn’t remember what happened that night, because for him, it never happened at all. He needs days, and he doesn’t have them.

“All right,” he says tiredly, slumping a little. “Okay.”

[__]

The bar Aaron takes them to is well out of town, a small, easy-to-miss spot on the highway. A liminal space full of strangers and booths like hidden alcoves. They start with whiskey and move quickly to beer. Over the course of it, Aaron tells Abe all about the difficulty of finding an organization willing to work with him discreetly, understanding the risks, taking an amount of his proposals at face value, and most importantly, having the capacity to pay for it all and cover his tracks. Like seeking asylum, but with grant funding attached. He explains about going to France, glossing over the details of the people he found there and the work he is doing with them now. It is evident to Abe, and Aaron makes no effort to hide it, that the work Aaron is doing would not sit right with him; that Abe would consider it dangerous, unscrupulous, perhaps even amoral. In every iteration Aaron has been willing to do what it takes (if not always in the time that it takes), and this is obviously no exception, even when _what it takes_ is the blind involvement of countless others, the appropriation and large-scale manufacture of technology that was not singularly his own, and the willingness to look past what might happen as a result.

Again, Abe reminds himself: he shouldn’t be surprised.

Aaron goes on to explain the way he allowed the true utility of the technology to be known, slowly, in stages, to a limited and thoroughly vetted selection of people. He explains how easy it became when he had the support system, the money, the secrecy, and the reputation to orchestrate events; how it became possible to guide others in the process in a safe, regulated way; to involve medical professionals able to analyze the health effects without fully understanding what had caused them; how tracking down his double, and eventually Abe himself, became a simple matter of a few phone calls and some allocated resources.

He has become, as they once daydreamed, above the law. He describes it like it was easy.

And then he tells Abe about finding Aaron dead in the box. How he’d been there for days, his body slingshotting back and forth from A-end to B-end, useless now as the weebles that made the original journey—inert, able only to emerge, finally, at the B-end.

“You know that for sure?” Abe says. “Did you…”

“I went back.” Aaron nods. “I don’t do it much anymore. We’ve limited each person’s use of the machine until we have a better grasp on how the travel affects the body. But I had to do it for this.” He takes a small sip of his beer, circumspect in the amount he drinks, just like Aaron that night so many months ago, a memory that is now Abe’s alone. “When I opened it at the A-end, he wasn’t there.”

“Holy shit.” It is surely grotesque to be fascinated by the scientific implications of the specific circumstances of the death of his friend. Abe suspects he needs it, though, needs to attach some kind of significance to this that isn’t just the growing hole in his heart. “So what, it’s… We said there was a probability involved—”

“A slight chance that whatever’s inside wouldn’t come out at the B-end.” Aaron nods again, watching Abe intently. The closeness of his stare is unfamiliar; it doesn’t have the intense, cold calculation of the Aaron Abe remembers. This Aaron is… he’s still very much _Aaron_ , but that which Abe had found so sinister is absent. Instead the word he would use might be… gentle.

Not comforting. But gentle.

“But…” Abe shakes his head. “So if we’d traveled back and opened the box at the A-end then we still wouldn’t have seen the weeble.”

“We’re still not sure exactly what that probability is,” Aaron points out. “But I don’t think it comes down to how we observe it externally. I think it comes down to what’s inside coming out. Like you said, the weeble’s stupid, it can’t choose when to exit. Neither could Aaron. Without that—”

“—it’s just a gimmick.” Abe leans back and drags his hand slowly down his face, going over it a few times. “So does that mean it’s tied to… what, free will? Are we getting into metaphysics here, I mean, what the fuck?”

“I’ve got people on it,” says Aaron dismissively, which is not nearly as placating as he seems to think. “I think the point was it was too late. At that A-end, he either wasn’t in the box yet, or he was dead already.”

“Jesus.” Abe hunches over, bracing himself on his knees. “What about… I mean, he still exists _somewhere_ , right? Before he loops back?”

“Abe, I can’t possibly guess how many Aarons are still completing circuits,” says Aaron. “But I’m not about to go back and break one of those loops to preserve the number of extras we have in active rotation. That doesn’t serve anyone.”

Abe sees the sense of that, of course he does, but he can’t help feeling a little cold about it. “So it’s better this way.”

“I don’t see it as a question of better or worse. It was inevitable. And it’s practical, safer, to let it lie.”

“Yeah.” Abe supposes he can’t argue with that. It would be pointless to try. He blows air through his teeth and covers his face with both hands. “So… when you found him, you…”

“I made sure no one would find him, or find out who he was. His box, everything else he had, it’s all with my people now.”

Abe looks over the tops of his fingers at Aaron.

“I did what I had to do, Abe,” he says quietly.

“No, I get that,” mutters Abe, lowering his hands and letting them both rest on the table. “And… you came here because…?”

“A few reasons.” Aaron lifts a shoulder in a casual shrug. “I’m putting arrangements in place for the possibility of my own death, so this doesn’t happen again. I had to come here and steal some records, essentially.”

“From everything you’ve told me, you didn’t have to personally _come_ here for that,” says Abe, a little derisive.

“I also thought you deserved to know.” Aaron holds his gaze until Abe is forced to look away.

“Thank you,” he says eventually, uncomfortably.

Aaron sighs and cups his hands around his half-downed beer. “Look,” he says, “I don’t know what happened between you two. I know it was bad. That much was obvious. I… I guess I just…”

It’s not like Aaron to fumble so much, and it draws Abe to look back. He’s gazing off into the middle distance, his eyes moving as if in a dream, thinking over what he wants to say. Perhaps gentle wasn’t the right word either. This Aaron is something Aaron has never been: _cautious_.

“I wanted you to know,” Aaron continues finally, and swallows as if nervous, “I regret a lot of what happened, or what might have happened, I guess. I don’t know if I should consider myself culpable for what he did. We had the same idea, probably would have gone about the same way. But he had one up on me, and that extra time through… I don’t know. I think it changed him a little. It probably would have changed me the same way. I don’t know how that works. I mean, that’s getting into metaphysics again, what the deviations mean, and I’m not here to debate that bull. I just mean… if I had it to do over again, and I mean that in the figurative sense for once, I’d… do a lot of it differently. I know that doesn’t change anything, I just… I felt like it deserved to be said. By someone. One of me.”

He takes another drink, for once avoiding Abe’s gaze.

Abe studies him for a while. Apart from the changes he’s already noted, there’s nothing separating him from the Aaron he’s always known. For all intents and purposes, he _is_ the same Aaron he’s always known. They all came from the same root origin; they were all each other once. Having this conversation without the full context, though, it feels… Abe isn’t sure how he feels.

“Aaron,” he says slowly, after letting a good heavy silence fall between them, “do you remember that night in college, senior year, after finals?”

Aaron looks at him in surprise, real, full surprise. Eyes wider, eyebrows raised, lips parted in a subtle attempt to find the words. Abe doesn’t need words; that reaction is all the answer he needs.

He continues before Aaron can pull himself together: “Why did you…” Words catch and stumble, and Abe finds he can’t keep his gaze steady, so he looks at his hands, hands that are weaker and worse than they once were. “Just tell me why, Aaron. If you’ve come here to tell me shit that needed saying a long time ago, and not even by you, then… tell me this, too. Why you agreed to… do that, and why you never cut me loose after but you always kept me at arm’s length, and… just tell me why. Please.”

After enough time has gone by with no answer, Abe finally chances a look up. Aaron is, startlingly enough, still looking at him. Eye contact seems to jar him out of silence at last. “I…” he says, and has to clear his throat. “I’m sorry, Abe.” He sits there for a moment, and for that moment Abe fears that might be all he has to offer, but then he says, “I… don’t have a good answer. Other than… I was impulsive, and selfish. But you know that. You know that about me.”

It’s still a surprise to hear him say it. “Selfish,” Abe repeats, a little confused.

“I’ve… learned a lot, in the past several months,” says Aaron. “Not just about what we built. I’ve learned things about myself. I guess I just… I have a lot to be sorry about, and a machine that lets me fix my mistakes, up to a point.”

“It won’t go back far enough,” Abe murmurs, running a finger along the rim of his glass.

Aaron picks up the meaning without knowing the brutal context of it: “Yeah. Yeah, it won’t.” There’s a bit of the old Aaron showing in him now. Agitated. Drumming on the table. Looking around busily. Always thinking. “Abe, I’m no good at this,” he admits. “I never got good at this. At talking about… At apologizing, or owning my mistakes, or any of it. Putting this on other people, seeing what happened to the other Aaron, it’s… it made me think about a lot of things. I started trying harder. I… I should have apologized for that a long time ago. I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t ask for an apology,” says Abe quietly. “I asked why.”

Aaron opens his mouth and shuts it again.

“Let me ask a different question,” says Abe. “Do you think it was a mistake?”

“I—”

“If you could go back and undo it, would you?”

“Abe—”

“Because you told me that you knew,” says Abe. “You told me you’d always known. You said that to me, like you understood, and then you did what you did and you never talked about it again, Aaron, ever. You never let me talk about it. You never even let me touch you, for fuck’s sake. Do you know what that did to me? _Do_ you?”

“No.” Aaron looks at the table, still and steady once more. “I didn’t think about you. I _don’t_ think about anyone. I didn’t learn how, until—until there was more than one of _me_. Until it wasn’t just me I had to think about, it was… this whole other _me_. Abe—” his voice takes on a sudden and fairly alarming note of urgency, “there’s something you should know.”

“Jesus.” Abe sits back, arms folded tightly, feeling simultaneously like he wants to retreat into himself and like he wants to have this out properly. He doesn’t want new input. He wants to watch Aaron unpack and untangle his questions until he gets an answer he can live with. Dreading whatever’s coming, he grumbles, “What now?”

“I called him. Aaron. The—Aaron Prime, I guess. Months ago. Would have been just a few days after you and Aaron split, I think. I called the Aaron who got to keep being Aaron and I told him everything.”

“Wh—” Abe actually experiences the sensation of color draining from his face, a sudden heat loss, a sense of vertigo as the fullness of this hits him. “You _what?”_

“I had to. I owed it to him.” Aaron sits forward, getting close, lowering his voice. “I drugged him. I locked him in the attic. I left him with no idea what happened. I couldn’t live with that. I just couldn’t.”

That’s what he meant. Learning how to own his mistakes, own _up_ to them. Owning up to his treatment of this timeline’s Aaron by _spilling everything_ Abe has been working so hard to keep locked down.

“This is why it’s been so fucking difficult,” he says with dawning, horrified realization. “Because of _you_. You told him what happened, he pieced it together with what Abe knows, and—Jesus Christ.” His nerves are screaming at him to get up, walk away, hit something, break something. He’s trembling, he knows that. Aaron can see it, staring at his hands. “You could have set this whole thing in motion again. Can you live with _that?”_

“It sits well with you, constantly sabotaging and undercutting their work, does it?” says Aaron coolly; there he is again, the Aaron Abe knows. “Forcing them into corners, stealing parts? That feels right to you?”

“I don’t _know_ , Aaron. I don’t know what else to do. We ruined our lives with this. I want to give them a shot at having theirs intact.”

“My life’s not ruined.” Aaron cracks a smile, and Abe has never so badly wanted to punch him before. “Yours doesn’t have to be either.”

“Don’t… don’t do that. I’m pretty fucking pissed off at you right now. You just told me you’re the reason I’ve been busting my ass this whole time, and… and you still didn’t answer my question. I’m in no way prepared to accept shady job offers or whatever you’ve got.”

“It’s not shady.” Aaron laughs him off, pulls out a wallet and drops a sizable amount of cash on the table. “Come on, let’s get out of here. I need some air. My hotel’s just up the highway, we can walk.”

“Do you really not understand how mad I am right now?” Abe says, fully aghast.

“I get it. And we can start a fight club in the parking lot, or we can go to my hotel room, and I can answer your question.”

“Why can’t you just answer it _now?”_ It comes out petulant. Aaron is already getting up and heading for the door, leaving Abe no choice but to follow.

“Abe, I can apologize all night for the shit I’ve put you through,” says Aaron as soon as they’re out into the open air. The rain has stopped but mist hangs heavy all around them. “I can try to justify my actions and we can argue about it until the sun comes up. Or we can go around the back and you can hit me until you feel better. Or you can get back in your car and wait until you’re sober enough to drive somewhere, and if you do that you won’t ever have to see me again. But what I want to do, what I’d _like_ you to do, is go to my hotel, go up to my room, and try something different.”

Abe considers his options as given, none of them particularly appealing. He stands there looking at his car, calculating how long he’ll have to wait before he’s safe to drive, then driving away, far away, never to see this Aaron again. Parking in one of his usual haunts. Sleeping in the passenger seat, as always. It’s been a very long time since he slept in a bed.

Maybe it’s a stupid thing to base a decision on, but stupid or not, it’s the bed that does it. “Fine,” he mutters, digging his hands into his pockets and following Aaron along the highway. The walk is silent, which is probably a good thing. The night air does manage to clear Abe’s head a little, leaving him calmer, if not entirely at ease. The hotel isn’t far; Aaron leads them down the hill from the road, crossing through the parking lot and straight into the lobby. The receptionist doesn’t even look up at them as they walk silently to the elevators. So much the better.

Aaron’s room is nondescript, just like every other hotel room they’ve stayed in, giving the whole situation an uncomfortably familiar air. Halfway between nostalgia and déjà vu. Aaron steps in, stripping off his hoodie as he crosses the room, leaving it draped over the back of a chair. He reaches the room’s approximate center, and turns around, facing Abe with his hands now in his pockets as well.

“Sorry,” he says, rather uncharacteristically. “It’s just easier to talk in here.”

“I know.” Abe doesn’t come in all the way, sort of hovering by the door. He folds his arms, expectant, unwilling to give Aaron anything concrete to work with. He’s still owed an answer.

Aaron understands the dynamic and tone of Abe’s posture immediately, and smiles a little, gazing absently at the carpet.

“It _was_ selfish,” he says, for a moment leaving Abe grasping uncertainly at the straws of their conversation; taking them back to where things had been abruptly cut off in the bar, as though nothing had happened in between. “Because I knew you were—I knew what you wanted. I’d known pretty much since sophomore year.”

“Jesus Christ.” Abe doesn’t know whether he’s annoyed that Aaron had apparently been harboring that information without acknowledging it, or embarrassed that he’d apparently been so obvious.

“I didn’t do anything about it until that night because I—I thought it wouldn’t matter. We were graduating and I thought, we can get this over with, and that’ll be that. And I was stupid, and I didn’t want to admit that I—”

Abe knows what he’s trying to say. The way he stops himself from alluding to specifics, the way he avoids eye contact, it all tracks with the awkwardness and fear that Abe’s felt to some degree throughout his life. He doesn’t need to hear Aaron say it to know what it is: _that I felt the same way. That I wanted it too._ Something of that variety, something too close and intimate and open for either of them to say aloud with any more directness than the vague allusions they’ve both already given.

“You did,” says Abe, letting him off the hook. He doesn’t inflect it like a question, but it is a question. Or like something he can’t quite believe.

“Yeah.” Aaron nods slightly, looking now at the wall, just past Abe. “I didn’t know how to—I still don’t. I think I thought I would have cut you loose after that but then I couldn’t. I told myself it was because we worked too well together, and it _was_ that. Just not… exclusively that.”

Abe doesn’t know what he actually wanted to hear. Maybe nothing would have made it better. Maybe there was really nothing that would make this hurt less. Too much time has gone by, too many mistakes have been made. This Aaron can’t make up for what the other one, the dead one, did months ago. All he can do is contextualize it, and in some ways, that hurts far, far worse.

“So you got married,” Abe says.

“I wanted to be normal,” says Aaron. “I mean—live the normal life, the one we’re expected to—It’s not that I didn’t care about Kara, I just—” He shakes his head, a little concession, a sign that this is hard for him to talk about. “I’m not… I wasn’t _pretending_ with her, I—”

The word Aaron seems to be floundering around, or maybe recoiling from, is _bisexual_ , but Abe doesn’t feel like throwing him a line or getting into a deep talk about shit they’re long, long past. Those little details don’t matter. Aaron’s not clarifying anything Abe didn’t already know.

“Aaron, stop.” Abe holds up a hand, raising the other to rub at his temples. This, the conversation, coming here, it all feels distinctly like another mistake waiting to happen. Better to kill that now. “I’m sorry I brought it up. It doesn’t matter. None of it does.”

Aaron is quiet for a while, and eventually Abe drops his hand from his face and looks at him, only to find him looking back.

“There’s a lot I wish I could fix,” says Aaron.

“Yeah.”

“Abe, I…” He takes a step forward then stops, seeming to think better of it. “I know you don’t approve of what I’ve been doing, and you probably don’t want anything to do with me, but… if you _did_ , if you wanted to get out of here, away from this… You could come back with me. I can arrange things. We can keep tabs on our doubles remotely, if it’ll make you feel better. We could work together. Like before. Before… everything.”

There is no before _everything_ , as the fumbled conversation Aaron is now scrambling away from clearly indicated. But Abe doesn’t want to drag them back into that. He just stands there, looking at Aaron, waiting, he’s not sure what for.

Aaron is waiting too, and there’s a visible slump in his demeanor when he realizes Abe’s playing multiple layers of hard-to-get. His shoulders droop a bit, he resorts again to looking at the floor.

“Please, Abe,” he say softly. “I don’t know how to fix it. How do I fix it?”

There is no easy answer to this. Abe doubts whatever Aaron is doing will ever sit right with him. He isn’t sure what Aaron truly _wants_ , and isn’t sure what he’s prepared to give. But those are issues they can untangle, will be _forced_ to untangle if he agrees to anything; issues which will remain knotted and unsolvable if he remains where he is. He’s tired of pushing, especially when Aaron isn’t pushing back. Maybe it’s the honest, uniquely vulnerable question. Maybe it’s the way Aaron is finally, finally letting a significant portion of his guard down, leaving himself open. Maybe it’s as simple as the _please_.

“It’s not gonna happen overnight,” he answers after a few long, slow-ticking seconds.

Aaron’s eyebrows twitch—he’s not hiding himself anymore, so Abe sees all the little facial tics, recognizes the significance in them. He’s surprised, a little hopeful. Nothing like the Aaron Abe spoke to last, who talked like he’d already given up, manic and dangerous and aggressively apathetic. This Aaron has had room to breathe, and it’s allowed him to slip back a little into more of what he used to be like. Abe wonders if the same possibility would be available for him.

“Then I’ll be patient,” says Aaron.

Abe is still entrenched in the effort of being bitter, callous, stern, and unforgiving, so it takes him a few moments to reset himself, letting some of that tension slip away, letting himself accept the sincerity of this promise. It’s been a long time, he thinks, since he’s felt anything like that.

“Okay,” he says, which means a lot of things.

Aaron smiles easily, which looks better on him the more Abe gets used to it. “Okay,” he says.


End file.
